NEW JERSEY
NJ.com
By MaryAnn Spoto | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on March 23, 2015
TRENTON — The attorney for a Pennsylvania woman who wanted a religious divorce said Monday that a Lakewood rabbi instructed her family to pay the rabbi $60,000 as part of his attempt to secure her divorce.
Fredric Goldfein told jurors in the federal conspiracy and kidnapping trial of Rabbi Mendel Epstein that in his efforts to get a Maryland man to agree to a divorce, Epstein instructed him to wire $60,000 to two of the congregations he led.
A few days after the money was transferred to Epstein’s congregations, the husband, Aharon Friedman, was attacked on July 29, 2012, by three men at the home of his former in-laws in Pennsylvania in an attempt to force him to issue the divorce.
Goldfein, testifying for the federal government in exchange for immunity, said he was surprised when he heard about the attack on Friedman and called another rabbi to try to learn more details.
Goldfein, who is a rabbi, said he was led to believe the money was to go to the husband, Friedman, as part of his agreement to grant his wife a religious divorce so that she would eventually be permitted to remarry in the Orthodox Jewish community.
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